When you were young, did your mother insist you drink all your orange juice or take chewable vitamin C tablets during the winter? As an adult, do your friends and co-workers recommend taking vitamin C at the first signs of a cold?

In addition to minimizing the effects of the common cold, vitamin C (ascorbic acid) helps your body maintain tissue strength and cartilage growth. Combined with vitamin E, it also works as an antioxidant for allergy sufferers.

If none of this is news to you, the following information just might be…

Although originally met with skepticism, intravenous vitamin C (IVC) is becoming increasingly accepted for cancer management. A research paper (Padayatty 2006), published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal highlighted what is likely to become the future of IV vitamin C therapy in cancer.

This paper includes contributions from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Health, the Center for Cancer Research and McGill University. Since the publication of the paper, there has been a significant increase in the use of IV vitamin C among several leading oncology clinics throughout North America.

Study after study, going back over decades resulted in similar findings. A leading oncology research team (Cameron and Pauling 1993) concluded that “the administration of this harmless substance, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), might provide us with an effective means of permanently suppressing neoplastic cellular proliferation and invasiveness. In other words an effective means of controlling cancer.

Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in adequate doses might prove to be the ideal cytostatic agent. More recent research efforts by leading cancer clinics strongly support previous reports of profound positive impact from this intervention. These include collective studies of almost 4,000 patients who were actively receiving antioxidant therapy. Their findings indicated increased survival as a treatment outcome (Simone 2007). Of equal importance is a separate review of more than 280 peer-reviewed papers that examined data collected from over 8,500 subjects. This comprehensive review highlighted the lack of any adverse reactions when IV vitamin C protocols were combined with antioxidant and chemotherapy interventions.

As a result of these and other studies, reports and reviews, here’s what we know:

IV vitamin C is an effective cancer therapy alone or in conjunction with many conventional chemotherapeutic drugs. The ability of IV vitamin C to prolong survival, improve quality of life and reduce adverse effects of conventional cancer therapies has been reproducibly demonstrated over several decades. Is the quality of life of someone you know worth sharing this information?